A "Star Wars" Defense System Can't Zap the Enemy Within

The Israelis will almost certainly bomb Iran in early December. This will precipitate a series of very interesting responses from the world’s major powers. Our own fearless leader will express dismay that the “process” of infinite palaver and negotiation was not allowed to explore unplumbed depths of futility. The Chinese will be simmering for reasons not entirely clear to me: Iran has been a thorn in their side for decades, yet they seem intent on letting Adhmadinejad’s nuclear embers produce a flame (perhaps only to make the U.S. squirm). The Russians will grumble and immediately set about looking for ways to turn the crisis to their selfish interest. And any thoughtful American conservative worthy of the name will have to ask himself once again why we had to take out Saddam Hussein, the one player on the world stage who had held Iran’s rabid theocracy in check.

Because, after all, nations have no sacred obligation to labor AGAINST their self-interest (even if they need not be quite so Machiavellian as the Russians): the toppling of Saddam’s regime may well have been the beginning of our national suicide. I write these words as an unregenerate isolationist. I no longer reject the word, though it is not of my choice and reflects, I believe, a facile reduction of complex issues. I do not believe that one world order is morally desirable; on the contrary, I believe fervently that the appearance of such a beast would be catastrophic to basic human freedoms, to cultural traditions, and to the life of the spirit. Such an order would eventually melt down all language into an inexpressive babble whose parameters would be defined by the mass’s gross needs and meager abilities. It would inevitably nurture a two-tiered social and economic system reminiscent of medieval feudalism, with a pampered, privileged elite on top and an enormous crowd of water-bearers and street-sweepers below. The drones would sooner rather than later be culled to reduce their strain upon the system, and thereafter they would be carefully bred (at scientifically determined rates) to enhance their serviceability—all of this in the name of the holy trinity, Cost Effectiveness, Environmental Safety, and Social Responsibility. Liberals will stand about uselessly wide-eyed as their more extreme messmates morph into full-fledged “progressives”, complete with an agenda for merging human biology with cybernetics; and at last they, too, will be required either to sign on or check into the Reprogramming Camp.

I do not see a happy Christmas awaiting the end of 2009, in short—but it might be less dismal than I fear if we would at last recoil from the brink of World Oneness. Western Christendom’s disagreements with radical Islam are beyond negotiation, yet to vaporize Islamic terrorists around the world in a preemptive strike would outrage our “live and let live” tradition embedded in the example of Christ. Maniacal cults like the Taliban thrive because they enjoy substantial local support: we have neither the logistical capacity nor the moral right to “change the hearts and minds” of the locals until they suit our taste, any more than our states have the right to take children from their parents because Dad insists that the Second Coming is at hand. As a nation, we have the right and the obligation, rather, to secure and defend our borders. The money we shovel into the pit of “re-conditioning” the minds of Muslims halfway around the world might serve to create a viable state-of-the-art missile defense shield around the North American continent. We would then be exempt from the gravest threats of our adversaries—both those adversaries we can identify today and those who might mysteriously spring up tomorrow. We would not have to menace our ill-wishers with a retaliatory Armageddon probably lethal to the whole planet (Mutually Assured Destruction) in order to stay safe, nor worry about the long-term deterioration and eventual disposal of a dangerous nuclear arsenal. If we could simply swat away any hostile assault, then we could live our lives in peace while defying whatever power round about the world would control us.

It is our own leaders who stand in the way of such a course. Why do they not want us safe? Because, among the progressives, an impermeable defense shield is correctly perceived as destined to remove the most compelling motive for forcing America to join a world order; and because, among the less ideological but more corrupt, the concept of such a shield is usually perceived as displeasing our enemies, in whose pay these blackguards are (or in whose prosperity, shall we say, they have heavily invested). Both types are traitors; and when one mixes in the eternal leavening of outright fools, one finds very few capable and honest representatives in the United States Congress.

Yet if national disgust with both parties continues to rise, we may just reach the critical mass necessary to advance the cause of our own villages and families and freedoms and faith once again, for a while.

Mistrust: A Sacred Duty of the Free Citizen

The question (or line of questioning—but there’s really just one question here) is sometimes put to me, “Why are you so cynical? Why do you not trust people in power to do the right thing? You’re a good person… do you think yourself the only one of his kind? If you vote for good people, will they not do right by the voters as you and I would do? How can we have a democratic government without trust?”

We do not, in fact, have or want a democracy. We have a democratic republic—which means that we elect reliable people periodically to do our will rather than respond to every question of governance with thumbs-up or thumbs-down in a great soccer stadium. People in stadiums often behave with suicidal folly—even sensible people.

This response contains the kernel of an answer to every other question (all of them, as I said, being truly the same question). People are weak and highly corruptible. Their voting behavior has never been so easy to manipulate—or not, at least, since the days when a whole community could actually be crammed into an amphitheater—as now, when images and sounds groomed and vetted multiple times can be broadcast to them during every waking hour, and almost during their sleep. Just because a “leader” is selected from among them does not mean that this figure is mystically cleansed of his or her human fallibility upon vaulting to Olympus. On the contrary, the chosen one is submitted to temptations far in excess of anything known to the common man. The intoxicating thrill of instant power, flattery, celebrity, wealth (for the job brings all the trappings of a royal setting, even if its perks do not immediately make their way into a personal bank account)… these are enough to convince any ordinary man that he has become a god—or that he is GOD.

We should always mistrust our elected representatives, for the same reason that we should always mistrust ourselves. We are not God—none of us. Not even close. Yet we enjoy a truly formidable capacity to rationalize self-serving behavior into its opposite. I have often heard government officials make this argument, or its equivalent: “Of course I cheated on my taxes! Everyone else does, too! Why should I impoverish myself? I need wealth to be re-elected—and I need to be re-elected so that I can do good work for the masses. They need me to be re-elected!” Pitiful… the meltdown of a human soul into the pitch of sophistical self-deception is always a deeply distressing sight.

In a republic, to be sure, we cannot trust no one; but we can and must aspire to trust as few as possible as little as possible for as brief a time as possible. Term limits would be highly desirable, in abstract. If government is so complicated that a freshman rep will require another two terms just to begin to understand which corridors lead where, then the rats’ nest where he transacts business needs to be plowed under and replaced by the simplest of designs. In practice, attempts to limit one person’s influence prove easy to circumvent. Vladimir Putin remains the de facto ruler of Russia, the Left insists that Bush Junior constantly did the bidding of Bush Senior (who both did the bidding of Dick Cheney), and we very nearly elected Bill Clinton’s surrogate to the Whitehouse in the last election. Such subterfuge can lull a healthy mistrust to sleep.

Of imperative importance right now, therefore, is not to press home some sort of rules change which promises to do our work of vigilance for us: the important thing is that we be vigilant. We should particularly not trust people whose behavior throws up such warning signs as these: they force public schooling upon the poor yet send their own children to elite private academies, they railroad a program of public health care through the legislature yet secure special alternatives for themselves, they take over private companies and forcibly cut executive salaries yet vote themselves pay raises and regale themselves with endless lavish junkets to Europe and the Caribbean, they seize control of cherished freedoms to save the natural environment yet create and massive and incessant stream of fuming traffic from Mexico to the U. S., they seek to monitor the air waves dictatorially because talk radio is misleading millions yet decline to prosecute thugs with bludgeons who stake out poling stations… and so on, and so on.

These men and women are whited sepulchers, bright and clean on the outside but carrying the stench of death within. They are hypocrites of the highest magnitude. Many of them deserve to be convicted of treason: some may deserve execution for deliberately plotting to set themselves up as kings over a once free, now subverted people. The level of threat implied in this population of professional shysters and Judases will NOT be assessed by history if the dog has his day—because the dog will write whatever miserable scraps of history are written, and who will read them in a nation of slaves? The threat, rather, must be assessed now, on the spot, and responded to without delay.

Vote these weakling specimens, many of whom have degenerated into profligate evil-doers, out of office. For God’s sake, don’t TRUST them. If some here and there appear to have honored the limited trust necessarily placed in them for a while, then extend that trust for another while. Do not, however, fall in love with a name or a habit of voting. Do not be stupid enough to believe that a repeat-offender lionized for his staying power deserves any more veneration than a Mob boss who has killed off all the competition.

Why Would You Believe That Strangers Want to "Take Care of" You?

Question: what should be done in the case of the person who hasn’t the money to afford health insurance, but who drives a “pimped ride” with extra-large tires, broad spokes, “spinners”—the whole bit representing an investment of at least $60,000? What if the person without coverage owns a wide-screen, high-def TV? What if he or she eats out twice a day, or goes a-gambling at least once a month? What about the person who attends two or three MLB games and as many NFL games per year and also allows him- or herself a trip to the beach over the summer?

I’m outraged at the cost of my health insurance; and yet, I pay far less for it yearly than any of the people above would likely sink into his or her manège during the same twelve months. My family and I choose to deny ourselves several luxuries and frivolities (including all of those just named) so that we may have something which comes closer to a necessity.

In effect, then, we are all (or all of us who pay taxes, which becomes a larger group with every week of the Obama Administration) being confronted with a “luxury subsidy”. We will pay more for insurance in the long run—through taxes—and have less service at the clinic with longer waits so that certain of our brethren may continue to squander their money and leave their families uninsured (i.e., insured by the “public option”).

Truth be told, much of the opposition to insurance companies would have been diffused a couple of years ago if Republicans had been allowed to pass a tax deduction for the self-insured. This initiative was blocked by the Democrat-controlled House, however. Why? Precisely so that a constituency for public health care could be created. As malodorous as Republican leadership was during the Bush years, with Congress sitting quietly by as the executive branch devoured more and more powers not permitted to it by the Constitution, Republicans were at least under the impression (the illusion, some of us were say) that the nation stood in imminent danger. For years, most Democrats have been ruled by no objective more noble than the manufacture of a permanently dependent class which could be relied upon to support at the polls a permanent ruling elite.

The situation has substantial irony. Growing up, I was surrounded by the popular notion (not entirely a myth) that Republicans secured the interests of big business, while Democrats watched out for the little guy. While Republicans labored to ensure that stocks paid nice dividends (a boon to the frugal petite bourgeoisie to which my family belonged—hence not just a service to fat cats), Democrats fought to keep the profit margin from gobbling up shop safety and humane terms of leave. Republicans preached tough love: you can make it if you really try, they argued, and privation will give you the will to try harder. Democrats indicted the homily’s hypocrisy: many of us will NOT make it, they underscored, because we were not born into the affluence and influence which you Republicans take for granted.

It occurs to me that an odd turn-about is evolving right under our noses, as is illustrated especially well by the health care “debate”. Under the Democratic plan, the little guy will in fact be worse off than he is now without any coverage at all. Were he to be carried in red ruin to an emergency room today, our poor schmuck would not be left in the waiting room to bleed out: public funding would cover his immediate needs. Even if his problem were less dramatic—if his child, say, could not afford new glasses—most doctors would cut him a deal on an exam and a pair of specs (contrary to the mercenary picture which our President has painted of the profession). Under every form of revision which has yet been proposed, the same person would face a rationing of care, longer waits, a scarcity of doctors, a bureaucracy-heavy slovenliness of attention, and a stagnant research-and-development sector. Inevitably, rich people would continue to get special treatment—more than ever—whether in the form of jetting to specialists in other countries or simply in that of employing their own unregistered doctors on the sly. When abortion was illegal, rich girls took sudden vacations and came back restored; poor girls bled to death in soiled beds after swallowing some quack’s poison. So it will be in Obama’s Tomorrow.

The little guy doesn’t win in this game—and he isn’t supposed to. Driving about town unemployed in his Cadillac (or whatever “green” equivalent he clunked it in for), he is an insufferable drain upon a system already bankrupt—not merely bankrupt, but deeply in the hole for decades to come. One way or another, he will have to be disposed of. He doesn’t understand this yet: he’s still voting just the way his handlers want him to—and they, for a short while, will pay him off out of the rich man’s pocket. Sooner rather than later, however, he will vote in various ways to abrogate his right to vote. He will make cannon fodder of himself. Those who depend upon others for everything and have only their vote to render in the bargain will at last be stripped of their vote. Waiting interminably at the doctor’s office during a pandemic for a vaccine in short supply is one probable scenario. When those of the poor folk who are ambulatory riot in the streets, the police will cut them down… and then the rich will be charged with calling out the troops, and the elite will carry the poor vote in the last election that ever takes place in this moribund nation, and… and on to a medieval society whose power structure is girded in high-tech chain-mail.

THIS is why we are being precipitated into the abyss of “reform”. It may not happen just yet—there are reasons to believe that many Americans now see through the health-care smoke screen. The gambit will be repeated on another part of the chess board, however. Again and again and again. As I keep writing in this space, do NOT suppose that any group of human beings other than your family will “take care of you” without a hidden agenda. Why would you be so foolish?

Spirituality and Government Compulsion Are of Two Houses

There is no holy obligation to create a government which enforces holy obligations. An Islamist society may take a different view if things; but for Christian ministers to throw whatever authority they may yet have (and they’re using it up at gas-guzzling rates) in support of “Obama-care” is insufferably arrogant. Be clear about this. The feasibility of providing a doc-on-demand for every resident, legal and illegal, of a society whose public coffers have long been empty may strike some of the fanciful as less dubious than it does those of us who can handle a column of figures. (After all, there are still so many RICH PEOPLE around!) Quite beyond practical issues, however, the “call to Christians” in this instance is unpardonably exploitative on the part of an ever more cynical and unprincipled administration and deplorably pompous on the part of self-styled men of God.

To feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and cure the sick insofar as is within one’s means is incumbent upon all Christians (though “the poor are always with you”: the utopian crusade to eliminate poverty, far from reflecting faith, bespeaks the secularist’s need for “results”). An obligation whose fulfillment is enforced, however, ceases to be a matter of choice and loses all its dutiful character. A robot is not “good” because it “bravely” defuses a bomb. It has no choice in the matter—it is programmed. Likewise, people whose contributions to the poor are extorted at gunpoint have not become charitable; they might well be deemed more morally admirable, indeed, for choosing to be shot, since in doing so they would at least assert themselves as creatures of free will. But we who hold the gun, you may say (I hope not—but someone may say) accomplish our moral duty by making those of ample means surrender a little wealth to the have-nots. This is a ghastly assertion, for the following reasons: in aiming the gun, you not only sacrifice time you might freely have spent yourself upon laboring for the needy (by staging garage sales, say, or holding raffles); you also and PRIMARILY (from a spiritual perspective) impose your chosen concern for the needy upon another free being—you deprive that other being of the freedom to struggle with his duties, to decide upon and live with his choices, and (in short) to grow in spirit. You have taken away what God has given… and who are YOU, little worm, to do so?

I have no great use for riches or love for the rich. I do not subscribe to the theory that all the rich have reached their state by being virtuously energetic. Maybe so, maybe not: energy is not in itself a virtue—one can be energetically deceptive or merciless. By the same token, however, I do not consider myself capable of foreseeing what good a rich man may do with his lucre if left alone. He may fund research into MS or build a plant which cheaply desalinates water. Who am I to force upon him and his like the creation of a vast bureaucracy dedicated only to a single repetitive activity as a string of ants is dedicated to carrying crumbs to the anthill? Or who am I to say that such force would execute God’s will?

If Obama’s phalanx of conscience-pricking ministers is so comfortably righteous in thus delivering God’s verdict on public policy, why does the same group not insist that the President outlaw abortion? Are these holy men more confident that welfare queens have a God-given right to be treated for obesity from my son’s college fund than that God intends for babies to enjoy the right of birth? Surely God wants children to have two parents; all indications are that the products of single-parent households run a greater risk of having a poor education, a low income, a higher stress level, and a prison record. Why does this circle of luminaries not lobby Obama to criminalize extra-marital sex and divorce? Why not ban TV shows and movies which celebrate violence? Why not dissolve the military and dismount all our defensive weapons systems (if we still have any)? Surely Jesus would never have approved of the gun, the tank, or the missile…

The truth is that not one of said ministers is capable of comprehending the complexity of the choices which sin and death have visited upon this world. No mortal is—but secular utopians in the sheep’s clothing of the pulpit least of all. Indeed, it is evident that many of these soi-disant oracles enjoy rather generous salaries themselves (not to mention all the perks of the job) and could really do much more to help the needy out of their own pocket. How about starting by sending the kids to public school and doing away with conferences, vacations, and nights on the town?

Whited-sepulcher hypocrites and grand-standing fools, one and all. God deserves much better servants… but the President couldn’t ask for a more star-struck bunch of puppets.

Ignore the Conspiracy to Ridicule Conspiracies

I seem to see public figures lining up like fighters on an aircraft carrier lately to disavow their belief in any sort of conspiracy theory—always in preface to their describing a possible conspiracy. “I’m certainly not a conspiracy theorist, but…” It must be time, then, for me to return to a well-worn hobby-horse.

To allow certain shills for sweeping public policy initiatives to convince you that only gullible fools ever entertain the suspicion of a conspiracy is to renounce your commitment to serious thinking.

No large corporation has ever lowered prices to knock smaller competitors out of business, right? That would be a conspiracy—and only an idiot believes in conspiracies.

No two or three owners of sports franchises have ever colluded to withhold whopping millions from a free agent so as to discourage others like him. No MLB or NFL schedule has ever been arranged so that popular, high-profile teams would play the most games during television primetime. No cereal company has ever placed cartoon figures in its flakes at just the time when its corporate affiliate was releasing a movie about said cartoon figures.

No mechanic has ever put deficient parts in a car so that the owner would soon need to bring it back into the shop. No product has ever been designed to wear out sooner than its predecessors so that consumers would have to purchase more of the same product earlier. No auto manufacturing company has ever resisted engineering a more fuel-efficient engine because its corporate first cousin just happens to sell oil.

When local politicians who own land just outside the city limits become active in raising city taxes, it’s just an accident if the value of their property shoots up as the wealthy flee to the suburbs. When state legislators introduce a bill designating tax dollars to send the physically challenged to a special summer camp, it’s pure coincidence if Senator X’s son-in-law owns said camp.

No young woman ever married a wealthy older man with the intent of divorcing him months later and legally walking off with half his fortune: that’s just bad luck. No struggling young attorney ever married a wealthy older woman prior to embarking upon a political career: that’s just good luck.

In short, life is embedded in conspiracies. To say that the CIA launched 9/11 is infantile. To say that there’s more to the JFK assassination than the Warren Commission declared is less so. To say that FDR prodded the Japanese into hostilities because the country didn’t want to enter a war with Germany—or that Churchill (then with the admiralty) knew that U-boats were in the vicinity of the Lusitania and did nothing to protect her, hoping that a catastrophe would bring the States into WW I… I don’t know. Neither do you. It’s not beyond belief, because life in general—and politics in particular—works this way. The people who encourage us to let conspiracies grow unremarked by jeering every time someone raises a suspicion (“You think Obama WANTS the economy to collapse? You must believe that the army captured aliens at Roswell, too!”) are themselves part of a conspiracy… or perhaps they are just the morons (to use the phrase of one such railing hack) that they charge us with being. Indeed, the President himself has implied over the last month that doctors, insurance agents, police officers, and talk-show hosts all participate routinely in vast conspiracies. It seems that the skullduggery is only the work of aliens when it’s not viewed from your side of the aisle.

The other night I heard a certain Mr. Cohen (I cannot confirm that it was Richard Cohen of Florida—the name turns out to be common in government) glibly dismissing every objection about the “health care reform” bill raised by Greta van Susteren with a “not true”. A word or two to reassure voters that this big-city phone book of legalese does not contain the abominations about which they have been warned… that’s should do it, right? To Greta’s objection that the bill’s language was too convoluted for one to know WHAT was encoded therein, he answered that the courts would tear to ribbons anything clearly, plainly phrased. To her question about his recent townhall meeting, he remarked that it was not representative—that two-thirds of his constituency was African American, while only about 5% of the faces at his meeting were black. He concluded by stressing the need for citizens to trust their representatives.

This all deserves to be mounted and framed in a Rogues’ Gallery. Within about three minutes, one of our Congressmen 1) sweepingly denied the presence of several items in the bill while admitting that its obscurantism was almost impenetrable, 2) further admitted that our courts are likely to shoot down anything not worded with enough lubricity to mean everything and nothing, 3) further admitted that fair representation to his mind equates to tabulating various skin colors in attendance (as opposed, say, to prioritizing public spirit and civic concern), and 4) advised his electors that they should resume their blinders while he and his mates go about their very complicated and arcane business.

This doesn’t sound like the kind of atmosphere in which conspiracy would thrive, does it? “Trust me…” now, where else did we hear those two words during the past few years?

Neo-Cons Are Just the Newest Con

I received a submission for Praesidium early this summer from a previous contributor who attached certain odd claims to the essay’s history. It was under consideration elsewhere, he wrote… yet I could use it if I wished. He had frequently “loaned” it to colleagues so that they might employ it in their classes… yet the footnoting was incomplete and improper (which, admittedly, could explain why it was forever “under consideration” elsewhere). The piece wasn’t at all lacking in merit, though its subject has been well worked over during the past decade: the ascent of the sixties generation to power in the academy, and the consequent veering of the curriculum—especially in the Humanities—toward a loathing of everything Western and canonical. My journal enjoys a 501c3 status, so I seek to preserve its pages from any appearance of narrow political partisanship (the reason behind my removing this column from the site of The Center for Literate Values, as well). I was a bit uneasy about some of this submission’s generalizations, therefore. Yet what most troubled me was its conclusion. Because of the academy’s bias, “newly minted Ph.D.s” (a condescending phrase used consistently by the author and consistently mis-punctuated) should be tutored upon graduation in a kind of summer school run by such worthies as… the essay’s author. The goal: to introduce them properly to those canonical Western works which they had been raised to detest at a distance.

Now, if the author were right about the academy’s bias (as he most surely is), why would he, without taking leave of his senses, suppose that its ruling elite would collaborate in this re-programming of “newly minted Ph.D.s”? You’d have to read the essay for yourself—but I promise you that it concealed no hint of Swiftean irony. And a re-programming is precisely what the author had in mind, and what he described. If the intellectualist Left is to be deplored for superciliously feeding “correct beliefs” to the benighted—and the author’s essay had cited the intractably arrogant Richard Rorty in this regard to fine effect—then why would the Right not be equally deplorable for using the same tactic? The thinker dedicated to Western ideals is supposed to hold, like Socrates, that the truth will out: in this case, that hungry young minds will inevitably read great books of their own volition, DESPITE and not BECAUSE OF the hemlock waved in their face. Though this formulation is naïve if stretched to an optimism about our ailing culture’s recovery within familiar boundaries, I and most of my collaborators at The Center are convinced that the great books will again float to the top after the United States has fragmented into three or four countries, after China’s Christians have successfully martyred themselves to bring down an inhuman tyranny, etc., etc. Goodness will not die, any more than it will be revived by chanting a catechism under the shadow of the master’s stick.

In short, I have found something faintly but irrepressibly presumptuous about this contributor throughout the brief history of my dealings with him. The friction between us finally produced sparks this past week. As I prepared to take the journal’s summer edition to the printer, I received a file in my e-mail which, I was assured, was a completely rewritten version of the “great books” essay. I laboriously worked through the same old passages, inserting hyphens, unraveling clumsy gestures at foreign languages, and trying to make the footnotes respectable (I at last took the blame for them upon myself in an editorial aside where I apologized for having “rushed” the author) without finding anything new besides a single long citation. Yet I preserved my humor. The author seemed willing, in a friendly overture, to exchange some e-mailed thoughts about how his neo-conservatism differed from my “paleo” variety, and I obliged him with thoughts similar to those I have shared in this column. His response… hmm. Difficult to gather the strands. Something about how big cities are exciting and people in the boondocks are all rubes. The Unibomber, I was invited to observe, was a withdrawn survivalist (and, of course, we know that urban centers never produce mass-murderers!). If we do not carry our technology and progress into the future, we shall be outstripped by the Axis of Evil in nanobots and rockets—and then the world will be ever so much worse than we would have made it!

And so on. I responded that I was busy freezing my apricot harvest and plotting my next mass-murder, and signed off.

I write of this annoying encounter here in my blog because I want my readers to be keenly aware that “conservatism” need not be a bad word—that, to be precise, there are false conservatives of the “neo” variety among us who possess all the bad qualities of liberals and none of the endearing ones. The liberal believes that we should not develop a machine or technique further simply because the next step is clear and feasible—that we should weigh, rather, the human cost of that step. So does the true conservative. The liberal recognizes that people are more satisfied living in relative harmony with nature, their routine measured in footsteps and the reach of an arm, than living atop a high-tech house of cards precariously holding natural forces at bay. So does the true conservative. The liberal believes that the world’s various tribes have an inalienable right to preserve their time-honored customs free of constant assault from satellite-purveyed images of pornography and whimsical mayhem… or so the liberal would say, if he or she had a true conservative to help out with the wording (for liberals become hopelessly perplexed by the paradox of “cultural freedom”, which is nothing less than the freedom to restrict things like sexual expression).

On all of these fronts—and on numerous others—the real adversary of the liberal who has not yet run amuck in a chaotic hurly-burly of geometrically multiplying freedoms and of the true, old-time (= paleo) conservative is that slithy tove, the neo-conservative, a creature whose very name is a pulsing contradiction. The neo-con, like my erstwhile correspondent, relishes mocking and railing. He calls it “argument”, and he congratulates himself upon his proficiency at it. Everyone who divines a conspiracy behind some matter of public policy, for instance, is the precise equal of the crackpot who thinks that the CIA manufactured the mayhem of 9/11. Yet when he sees such moral equivalency on the Left, the neo-con leaps into the breach of logic’s battered wall like a superhero. My correspondent’s essay remarked, quite rightly, that one cannot have a serious discussion with a liberal who equates Joe McCarthy with Joseph Stalin. Are the prospects of serious exchange any better with someone who tries to sweep laterally from Wendell Berry to the Unibomber?

Global warming may be the biggest boondoggle of our time. I hope to write more on the subject soon: I most certainly am convinced that the Left has exploited fear of climate change to secure more political power. Yet the true conservative does NOT believe that human beings are better off spending hours of every day zooming about expensively and without roots to countless venues of work and play, much to the detriment of neighborhoods, urban architecture, and profound personal ties. The proper argument against car culture is not that it’s poisoning our air—it may or may not be—but that it poisons our soul; and to affirm that we must nevertheless keep driving down this road because a) we can’t turn back and b) other nations will amass car-collars if we do not is a pitiable mush of logical contradiction and moral nihilism. If technology enslaves us to certain courses of action, then it cannot be bettering us as beings of freedom, BY DEFINITION; and if we have backed ourselves into a corner wherein exploitation of our fellow beings is the only means of saving our children from starvation, then how could we not be better off growing the food we need on our own land?

My cultured metropolitan northeastern correspondent, of course, knows that the olives in his cocktails are not yet all artificially assembled in China: he knows that peons somewhere are sweating under the sun so that he and his gilded entourage can hatch witticisms about deconstruction around the penthouse pool over caviar. The extent of his concern about the peons’ humanity is that all peons around the world should be allowed to compete with each other for a dime a day. There you have him, my liberal friends: the quintessence of what you loathe. But please know that you do not loathe him more than I do.

News Flash for Professor Gates: Life Is Hard for All of Us

A couple of white cops in Cambridge, Massachusetts, pound on the door of a residence in an upscale section of town. A black man answers. They immediately assume that his skin is the wrong color to belong in this setting, and they demand to see identification. Having been satisfied on this point, they nevertheless insist that the poor man step outside—and once they have induced him to forsake the relative safety behind his threshold, they cuff him for disorderly conduct and haul him down to the station.

This is approximately the sequence of events which the President of the United States and his media minions project of the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., last week. The images are incredibly naïve. Consider some of the facts either scarcely mentioned or wholly ignored by the media menagerie (including FOX’s grandstanding “moderate”, Shepherd Smith)—facts, I stress, available to any adult possessed of common sense and requiring no access to police records.

a) A neighbor reported a stranger breaking into and entering Gates’s house: the two cops had to assume that the person they encountered inside might well be there illegally, since he had not been recognized by someone who lived next-door. At this point, any qualified and sane officer would adopt a “ready for anything” posture: no one disputes that the house had been entered forcibly.
b) Gates produced two forms of identification—but billfold debris is dubious proof that someone OWNS A HOUSE. A forged address could have been transposed upon an otherwise valid i.d. rather easily, the i.d.’s carrier may have reported his address falsely when registering, the carrier may have been a former resident now denied access by the owner, etc. How frequent are such cases? I don’t know—and neither do you, and neither does President Obama. (But I DO know that they are more frequent in university towns, having lived in many myself.) Police protocol, I would hope, requires that a suspect step outside under such conditions. If he were allowed to remain in the house while the contention that he was said house’s owner was further verified by computer, and if he were in fact a criminal, he might turn and flee, summon an accomplice for help, secure a hidden weapon for deadly use, etc., etc.
c) Gates appears to have barked to the officers almost at once, “You’re only doing this because I’m a black man!” If I were a cop, I would take this kind of remark—with all its innuendo of impending lawsuit and career-ending uproar—as a malefactor’s gambit to back me away from performing my duty. After all, Gates DID BREAK INTO HIS HOUSE. He should most certainly have appreciated that he had placed himself in a delicate situation, and have shown enough intelligence to recognize that his innocence was far from transparent—either to the police or to his neighbors. Indeed, one would have thought that a Harvard professor would possess enough sense to alert the neighbor adjoining whatever door he intended to pry open of his harmless design. Well, maybe not… not these days.
d) If the two cops had indeed backed off after being greeted at the door by an indignant and belligerently BLACK man, and if it later turned out that the man was indeed an intruder and had walked off with Professor Gates’s irreplaceable files, documents, and research, the two hapless men in blue would forever after have been branded nincompoops, at the very least—and probably also accused of half-investigating a crime in progress once they found that black people were involved.

The level of demagogy instantly reached by these trifling events will not help race relations in the United States. If the Cambridge police “behaved stupidly”, as the President told the world, then the President himself behaved disingenuously in seizing upon an incident whose details were an utter mystery to him in order to preach the sermon, yet again, Black Men Can’t Get a Fair Shake. Most of us have heard this homily too many times. I myself have devoted countless hours in my teaching career to giving certain students a little extra tutelage because, through no fault of their own, they were raised and educated in an impoverished environment. If they had the will and the wits to better themselves, I found the time. I have just this summer, however, watched from ring-side as a very competent female coach lost her job due to some patently trumped-up complaints that appeared in her file quite late in the school year (after most of us had left for the summer) and all at once. The gist of every charge? That she didn’t give her black players as much consideration as the whites. This is the button you push first when you want to make trouble, and everyone knows it—including the white males who jettisoned the unfortunate woman from their department.

Let’s get this straight. All different kinds of people have life hard for all different kinds of reason: short men, tall women, the overweight, the homely, the visually impaired, the deformed, the soft-spoken, the sensitive, the shy, the deeply traumatized, the unlettered, the over-educated, and—perhaps most of all—the punctiliously honest. Any one of these “afflictions” could be, in certain circumstances, a far worse handicap to professional and social success than having dark skin, which has indeed become a clear asset in certain circumstances (as the President well knows). People of Caucasian and Asian provenance are growing very weary of hearing people of African descent insist that they need and deserve special favors to make their way. In fact, I know personally of several African-Americans who have tired of being associated with this humiliating refrain; but they, of course, run the risk of being called “race traitors” if they speak up, since they stand in the way of unlimited freebees.

I tell you in all candor: if I ever have to break into my own house, and if a squad car pulls into my driveway five minutes later, I intend to be very, VERY obliging. I will have put a couple of human beings in a most awkward position—people who hope to see their children again later that evening. Professor Gates, whose work I have enjoyed on occasion, behaved stupidly. He needs to dig out an anthology of the ancient Greek poets, if one is yet to be found on Harvard’s campus, and look up Mimnermus. “Oude tis estin / anthropon ho Zeus me kaka polla didoi”—“There is no one among men to whom Zeus does not give many miseries.”

Where Vultures Circle, a Corpse Lies Near

I am less than twenty-four hours back from a week’s visit with my wife’s relatives in Rome, Georgia. The excursion has always been something of a journey into the past for me. Eastern towns, of course, always cling to an air of antiquity before the rude eyes of us wandering Westerners. Rome is more “backwards” than my Texas town of comparable size—meaning, in translation, that people move more slowly, build less rashly, and preserve architectural relics and scenery more meticulously. To my son’s delight (and mine, I must confess), Rome is also more baseball-friendly—for baseball remains a distant descendant of cricket, that leisurely paean to sunlight and greenswards, while football-mad Texas values only dumb force without finesse. (It is no accident that the two Major League baseball teams in Texas cannot master the intricacies of “small ball”, and that only one of them therefore has been to a World Series—which it promptly lost—in a combined century of futility.)

Yet Rome is also painful for me. It was my introduction to academe as a professional—and the experience was deeply humiliating. I was hired at Berry College, not because of my credentials, but because both factions of a feuding department decided that an ingénue like me could be readily manipulated (a fact which years of retrospect were required to divulge to me). When I showed signs of having a mind of my own, I was ambushed by a series of carefully engineered slanders which might have led me straight to a lawyer had I been the sort of pugnacious spoiled brat who does well in this calling. It isn’t of those times that I wish to write. So much water has now passed under the bridge and washed far out to sea that I might almost have stolen my blue Rome memories from a bad dream. The reflection that struck me last week full-force, rather, was how very poorly my society—my parents, my relatives, my teachers in high school, my professors in college—prepared me for life. Like so many, I blundered into teaching because I could do nothing else with my many degrees in literary studies and ancient languages: I was inetto a vivere (“unfit for living”), as the Italians say. At another time, I would have enjoyed teaching at any level. Students would have been brought up to respect their elders and to venerate the past, while supervisors would have been more concerned with transmitting an ethos than with building a career. At another time, I might simply have scribbled for a public which valued reading. No one in my youth had foreseen the slaughterhouse for which I was destined, so no parent or instructor knew to warn me—to advise me, say, to buy property and rent it, saving the poets for my free time.

These ruminations led me infallibly to others of an even more acid taste which will torment me till the day I die. I had thought, ingénue that I was, that the right sort of woman would be attracted to a decent man with manners and principles. Eventually, that woman and I found each other—but so late in our youth’s day that we were unable to have the kind of family which we had always longed for. I was brought up to believe (by two parents who couldn’t have filled a thimble with what they knew of the world) that, like the perfect job, the perfect mate would happen along by the time I was twenty-five or so, with due preparation and diligence. My ingenuous folly ran head-on into the sexual revolution. Surrounded by the ambitious and the highly educated, I found my efforts at selflessness and noblesse repeatedly minced and dumped at my feet like the results of a samurai’s warm-up on a dummy. Women who refused to see me again after a date or two because I honored a Christian standard of pre-marital abstinence: M___, K___, A___, C___, C___, J___, B___, D___, F___, J___, L___, C___, A___ ... and those are right off the top of my head. Women who quickly lost interest because I was merely a teacher (later college professor) and hence not raking in big bucks: B___, C___, M___, T___, K___, C___ … practically all of them, as I recall, met in conjunction with some sort of church activity. A hazy boundary had been crossed, I should explain, between the first group and the second. I had speculated, as I aged and grew profoundly lonely, that the New Woman was a god unto herself, dedicated to her own material and egotistical advancement and wholly averse to any sort of personal sacrifice—hence incapable of sustained relationships, let alone marriage. I do not think I was wrong in this speculation. What truly shocked me, however, was the ensuing revelation that “believing” women were so often simply dedicated to self-aggrandizement through other avenues. Whether or not they practiced recreational sex (and the appearance of not doing so often seemed no more than an enticement to whet the appetite), they expected eventually to see a highly lucrative payday. They regarded marriage, not as a burden of duties and sacrifices which they would assume equally and heartily with a devoted partner, but as a lifelong ticket to the easy life. They may not have wanted a career—many of them wanted to kiss their career goodbye; but most of them wanted to be Number One every bit as much as the self-actualizing academic feminist.

Do people crave sex in a decadent society as a means to money, or do they crave money as a means to sex? Or are both merely the most convenient currency for liquidating an insatiable narcissism?

My son pointed out to me, having stood through several renditions of the National Anthem, that American ballplayers preserve a posture of respect until “the home of the brave” is sung” but that Latin ballplayers slouch and nudge their neighbors. What does the Star-Spangled Banner mean to me? Not much, I’m afraid: not any more. We Americans like to cling to the illusion that we still possess a nation and a coherent, healthy society. Those who see us from the outside know better. What neither they nor we seem to know is that the sickness that rots us has been eating away for decades—throughout most of my own lifetime. I have seen it: I have lived it. We are perhaps a society without values, perhaps one which wears its values on its sleeve, perhaps one which holds very strongly to values whose true name we dare not speak. I saw it in the professional slaughterhouse to which I was surrendered as a callow young man; I saw it in the women who griped and whined incessantly about the male incapacity for commitment, yet who wanted ME off their doorstep because I wasn’t salivating to undress them or didn’t drive the kind of car which God would have bestowed upon His chosen; and I saw it in the pampered millionaire athletes who sat on an air-conditioned, stationary bus for forty minutes as half a dozen kids waited on the other side of an iron grill hoping—in vain—for just one of them to climb down and sign a baseball.

The stench is all about us, and Al Qaeda didn’t put it there. Neither did Bill Clinton, or George Bush, or Barack Obama. Vultures do not kill: they only clean up where death has already passed.

Somewhere Kruschev's Shoes Are Dancing

I was in Dallas last weekend, accompanying my son to a baseball tournament. We played in Carrollton, to be exact—one of several North Dallas suburbs to which the well-healed have fled from the inner city—and our motel was in yet more prosperous Addison. Luxurious, relatively low-rise office buildings (of the sort that proliferate in Texas, where spreading out is usually cheaper than piling up) lined the boulevards. Posh restaurants were legion. On the other hand, simple establishments patronized by people in our economic bracket were to be found only as we drove farther west on Beltline Road. We direly needed an ordinary supermarket early Sunday afternoon, for the team was scheduled to play at least one more game, and the temperature had risen well above 100 degrees. We were in search of bottled water. Finally we came to a strip mall of the kind known to any large thoroughfare in any American suburb. Yet this one failed to fit the mold in one disquieting way: it was strictly non-English. Most of the storefronts were labeled in Spanish (I believe I saw one announcing Thai merchandise of some kind). The people strolling through the parking lot were distinctly indio, as they are styled in Mexico (i.e., short, squat, and dark—descendants of native tribes far more than of conquistadors). The clerk in the mercado who checked me out had an oddly uneasy look on his face, as if afraid that trouble might start on his watch—that some lout might happen along and demand to know why one of mine was in their store. He certainly appeared to be a lot more nervous than I was.

What I miss when I listen to news or read editorials posted on the Net or suffer through three or four minutes of a politician’s blather is any awareness, be it ever so remote, of the kind of situation I have just described. The people who lecture us and claim to lead us really have no idea what’s happening on the ground. They don’t live on the ground: they live in their own gilded cloud. They live in Addison—they live at the eastern end of Beltline Road. They don’t know that their maids and yard men and illegal wage slaves are not speaking Castellano Spanish, but rather a sub-standard dialect in constant flux which numbers among its major objectives to keep gringos from understanding. They don’t spare a thought to the kind of civil unrest—gang fighting, race terrorism, literal skirmishing in the streets—that may erupt if competing cultures continue to be pumped into the same confined spaces as available jobs dwindle and pay plummets. The politicians, at least, are well aware of the value of race hatred as a means of mobilizing voter blocs; but even they think no farther than the next election, the next chance to grab more power. As for the columnists, publishers, and educators who lead a privileged existence in gated neighborhoods with state-of-the-art security systems, you will readily grasp that they cannot understand why poor people should not be allowed to scramble over each other for a chance at the few bills they will be offered (tax-free) to mow the patrón’s lawn.

The whole Dallas/Fort Worth area, where I grew up and worked at my first jobs, has become a nightmare of racing sprawl and concrete nullity. Much of this explosion is driven by the fusion of Texas and Mexico. I have now largely accepted that the fusion will become formalized somehow within the next few decades—and I look forward to it, in a way, if it offers some of us Americans a chance to form a new nation pruned of the moral and cultural rot of our utopian intelligentsia. Yet this concrete wasteland isn’t culture, either. As these people who grew up knowing how to raise their own beans and squash and mangos abandon that knowledge for hauling plywood or nailing shingles to make an endless succession of apartment complexes, I see only an anthill rising higher and higher. This president and his Congress have changed things only in the sense that they have accelerated all the ruination nursed along by the Bush Administration: the outsourcing of creative white-collar employment to foreign shores, the incubation of undereducated masses in ever greater need of public works, the destruction of the tax base, the multiplication of fuming freeways and restless travelers incapable of spending an evening with a book… nothing new, just more and more and more of the same. And this is our change.

The health-care system could instantly be healed if lawsuits were restricted. Greenhouse gases could be slashed to a fraction of their current values if immigration to urban centers like Dallas and LA were brought under control. Crime and poverty could be reduced if local neighborhoods were restored through a combination of abolishing zoning restrictions and designing pedestrian-friendly streets. The misery of unemployment could be much alleviated if children were taught agriculture throughout high school and if overhauled neighborhoods used some of their current garage-and-pavement space for gardens. Ethnic traditions could be fostered in a meaningful way if traditional methods were combined with high-tech agriculture and if tighter-knit, more stable neighborhoods matured around corner churches and parks and cafes. Life could so easily be made better.

But no—we must have the free-bus-pass, free-health-card regimental dystopia of perfect idiots, and the helter-skelter, divide-and-conquer chaos of ruthless political opportunists. What Nikita Kruschev said half a century ago as he pounded a U.N. rostrum with his shoe, Barack Obama would be repeating right now if he had a degree of sincerity equal to his Bush-like arrogance: “We will bury you.” I did not celebrate the Fourth of July yesterday. To set off firecrackers over a fresh grave seems to me in consummate bad taste.

Strangulation of the Republic Hides Behind Celebrity Obituaries

By all means, let us grieve over Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. Just before that, we were busy poring over the private e-mails of Governor Sanford to his mistress—and cluck-clucking over their sordidness in a truly odious display of hypocrisy, we who allow our kids to hear utterances a thousand times more salacious every night on Family Guy and South Park. I personally prefer to grieve for and wax outraged at the dismantling of our nation and culture… but don’t let me stop you. And don’t be so “negative” (contemporary code for “thoughtful”) as to suspect that your media handlers are hiding the republic’s ruination behind a smokescreen of celebrity death and scandal—that if Sanford’s mistress did not exist, she would have to be created. Why mar the moment?

The President, in an overweening abuse of executive power worthy of his predecessor, is in the process of putting the national census under the exclusive authority of the White House—and specifically of entrusting it to ACORN, that advanced exercise in voter fraud which helped him to get elected. His minions will ask you detailed questions about your family life and economic condition; and if you refuse to answer any item, you will be subject to a $5,000 fine. Let’s invest this historical moment, however, in pondering the tragic ironies of Michael’s roller-coaster life.

The President and Ms. Pelosi aspire to confiscate the gun of every law-abiding citizen, eventually. Pending legislation (HR 45) would require you to obtain an expensive license (renewable yearly, like your car’s licensure) for which you will become eligible only after passing a written test—not an hour of instruction on the target range, but a sheet of lawyers’ gobbledygook which can easily be tweaked from season to season as more taxes are needed or as the desire to disarm the citizenry tilts the balance. If you should leave your home state without obtaining a new gun license in a timely manner, you may receive up to five years in prison. Even if you don’t own a gun, just speculate for a moment about the probable effect of this legislation on wicked people who live by robbing, raping, kidnapping, and killing. Their uncertainty about your state of readiness to repel them has kept them at bay this long (or do you really think they fear the arrival of two ticket-writers in a screeching squad car twenty minutes after the 911 call?). Or speculate, if you prefer, about Hitler’s early and effective program of disarming everyone not in uniform… or about a speech delivered by candidate Obama a year ago in Denver which dimly outlined a massive new federal police force. Speculate about whether a home-invader is really all that bad compared to door-to-door visits from the Nazi SS. But no… you’re right: it’s more important to speculate about whether the King of Pop received a fatal overdose from his resident doctor.

Cap and Trade is a looming debacle. People like Pelosi and outfits like GE (which pulls the financial strings at that green beacon, NBC) stand to harvest immense profits if the nation is forced to erect windmills and solar panels everywhere. They’re heavily invested in the only horse that will not be wearing a lead saddle under the revised rules. New energy taxes will drive yet more small enterprises out of business—will bring Flint, Michigan, to your town, perhaps. Power companies will of course be gravely stressed as people necessarily use less and less electricity due to its rising cost, and they will be forced to raise rates even further. The President greets this prospect with serenity. Americans have been relatively sweat-free for too long: time for them simply to be deprived of AC, like the people of his father’s homeland. Of course, he and his adorable family will live their charmed existence in spaces whose thermometers never blaze a trail into the seventies during the summer… but why be mean-spirited when one of Charley’s Angels cries out to be remembered?

Have you already forgotten about the swine flu as you study old images of Farrah in a bikini? Enjoy your holiday. As soon as temperatures begin to drop again, it’ll be back with a vengeance. Do you happen to recall the knee-jerk response this spring from Obama, Pelosi, and media shills like Shepherd Smith? Throw open the border—now that one case has been diagnosed in New York, the bug is already among us. The President called out the National Guard—to safeguard the very limited quantity of flu vaccine in undisclosed locations. How sympathetic do you think this man will be in a true emergency? He’s working ever so hard right now on an overhaul of the health care system which will leave you rotting in the waiting room for months before seeing the doctor who gives you permission to wait in another line for more months as your cancer matures from the easily treatable variety to a kind of intracorporal kudzu. But let’s bend this discussion toward breast cancer and other women’s issues evoked poignantly by Farrah’s untimely departure.

I haven’t even mentioned the deficit, or hyper-inflation, or Kim Zong Il, or Iran. Old news. The President is going to throw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game! Now, there’s something to look forward to! Maybe you can catch the action on a wide screen downtown as you elbow other bystanders along a hot July pavement… just to start getting yourself accustomed to the future, I mean.

The Antinomian Academy

Below is the text of a "response" essay I intend to include in the forthcoming issue of Praesidium. Since I am pressed for time, since I rather like this piece, and since writing more about the crypto-fascist takeover of our society from the Left is unlikely to reduce my blood pressure, I offer the following as an invitation to you to check in on Praesidium: A Journal of Literate and Literary Analysis from time to time.

Whenever we publish an essay in these pages whose contents travel along a fairly clear political vector, I like to extend to thinkers traveling in the other direction a chance to justify their opposed calculations. My offers seldom draw any response at all, though I have received one or two gracious refusals. Professor Sugrue’s foregoing remarks plainly advocate a kind of cultural conservatism, The Center for Literate Values is just as transparently invested in preserving worthy elements of the past, and my own essay in this issue obviously aligns me among those who suspect progress of being nine-tenths illusion in most cases. An adversarial position, then, would be vigorously progressive and left-of-center. Scholars who occupy this terrain consistently register one of two responses to Praesidium, neither of which leads to the kind of publishable rebuttal I invite: they massively reject every page we produce and everything associated with us, as if our hands were red with the blood of innocent millions; or else (far less often) they advance those polite refusals to which I referred, hinting that they dare not run the professional risk of linking their name with an organ likely to be viewed by their masters as preemptively wicked. The former, of course, correspond closely to the Class of ’68, the latter to that of ’89. In neither case does the Left do justice to the values of freedom, candor, and rationality which it claims to champion.
So I shall try to say a few words for that side of the aisle myself. More accurately (since I would soon be writing a parody if I attempted a rhetorical reconstruction of arguments I find mostly void of merit), I will criticize my own side, an endeavor I can undertake with honesty and even fervor.
I find that the Academic Left hates the Right particularly for three reasons: the practice of Christianity, the operation of the capitalist marketplace, and the social subordination of women to men. All three grounds of loathing (for the reaction is quite visceral, despite the formidable education common in those who express it) impute a degree of hypocrisy to the Right—and they do so correctly, in my opinion. Mainstream American life is morbidly, perhaps terminally hypocritical. That life itself is so rarely appears to occur to these critics—but it might more often, I think, if those they criticize would admit to being hypocrites rather than pose as scintillating paragons.
Christianity: I am a Christian, which means that I believe in a supreme reality, scarcely discernible in our present misty sleepwalk, where utter goodness reigns. Such belief is supposed to change one’s life. Yet I must say that the people who have most deeply wounded me as I shuffle through my mortal coil have been loudly self-advertising Christians. I could mention the director of a private elementary school who told me placatory lies rather than address issues as my young son was bullied by an abusive teacher—then instructed the security guard that none of my family was to be allowed in the building upon my transferring the child to another school. (At the time, I was teaching Spanish to the whole small school almost gratis, and would have continued doing so after my son’s departure because I had pledged my word.) Or I might mention a certain coach who is giving us much grief at the moment as he conducts a private war against all parents not pliant to his absolute, arbitrary will. He announces himself a Christian at every gathering of any size and refuses to utter “damn” or “hell”, yet other four-letter words are entirely within bounds, and his sarcasm and broken promises are well known to young and old.
Phony or flawed Christians are not an indictment of Christianity—yet many academics were launched upon their life of defensive introversion by encounters with pseudo-pious fanaticism which inspired in them a reflexive, permanent mistrust of lofty claims. The reaction, as I have said, is distinctly visceral; yet such seething indignation, if overstated, is not entirely misplaced. Christianity does not run deeply enough in our daily practice for us truly to be the believers we so vocally call ourselves before the world.
Capitalism: radio blabberers are fond of calling ours the greatest nation in the history of the world—a claim which can hardly be justified by our output of composers, painters, or novelists. Yet such anemic creatures are universally derided in these quarters as a sign of the effeminate illness presently gnawing away at our once-robust bones. We were best when we were making the most money, and we made the most money when we were grinding out cars, dishwashers, and TVs. Any thoughtful person can see how a student of the arts would be repulsed by such advocacy—and the value system implied by this assembly-line superiority is, in fact, subversive to traditional Christian values. The past is instantly irrelevant, the less-than-new is immediately junk, neighborhoods are constantly bulldozed in favor of malls and highways, families are steadily sacrificed to careerist mobility, children are bred to have ravenous appetites for more and better…. Inasmuch as the Left deplores the anthill-without-a-center which is our reigning urban sprawl, it is hardly rejecting the classical notion of civitas or the Christian imperative to be a responsible neighbor given to moments of calm, quiet self-examination.
To be sure, our classical and Christian heritage is tossed out—baby with bath water—by the time the Antinomian Academy finishes its work of resistance against the tradition that the market-driven Right claims to represent. That this representation is a fraud never draws serious comment in the Halls of Ivy, where responses are once again visceral and childish. The disaffected sons and daughters of doctors, elite bureaucrats, and commercial franchisers who flood graduate schools in the arts identify Plato and Saint Augustine with parents and relatives who wanted them to kill their souls at a desk. Part of their revenge is to weave a witty argument wherein the Great Books have pimped for the power structure, rather as Plato is supposed to have been raped by the tyrant Dionysius. A shame. Witty caricature turns out to be a much weaker defense than the redemption of right reason would have been.
Then we have “gender issues”: probably no single source of personal trauma has sent as many mauled psyches into grad school in search of safe refuge as sexual disorientation. I believe our society has a profound and ever-deepening problem here. Men want to be men—i.e., independent and self-sustaining—while women, whatever they may say in their feminist morphos, very seldom care to link their future with that of a stay-at-home ne’er-do-well. (Many professional women have confessed to me that they refuse to date a man who earns significantly less than they.) Yet as our society has cut away its agrarian roots and equated a “living” ever more with “selling”, lucrative jobs have a) grown increasingly as practicable (or more so) to female talents as to male ones, and b) involved to an ever greater degree skills such as “fast-talking” and “arm-twisting” which manly men view with disdain. Men have lost respect for themselves, women have lost respect for men, male intellectuals are often fiercely embittered at their inability to attract a permanent mate, and intellectual females are just as embittered at their shrunken social horizons while also mortified that their bourgeois sisters are gold-diggers. Into this unhappy brew may be stirred the male intellectual who dreads vulgar competition yet feels no instinctive draw to rugged independence: he may become a recruit for “gay culture” simply because he belongs nowhere else.
I have written lengthily of the salutary possibilities within a marriage of technology and agrarianism. A High-Tech Agrarianism would allow a man maintaining a suburban residence on a half-acre lot to grow most of his family’s food in that primeval fashion which appeals to most men: i.e., to be beholden to no one, to face no daily sycophancy at the office, to live above the vagaries of market place and corporate buy-outs. It would allow women, simultaneously, a more direct shot at those more socially interactive jobs within the pulsating city which they seem to find specially rewarding. One would think that a Left-leaning intellectual would embrace this vision as the common man’s true Declaration of Independence: not a Marxian confiscation of private property by the public sector, but a frontiersman’s preservation of whatever food-bearing ground he can cover from the tyrannical intrusion of “elected” royalty.
Yet the Antinomian Academy has again missed its opportunity to raise meaningful objections against prevailing practice and contented itself with an infantile épatissement of its bourgeois parents, precisely in spoiled-child fashion. First sex without marriage, then pregnancy terminated at will, then heterosexual promiscuity, then an artificial cultivation of homosexuality… I have watched this plangent pageant strut by throughout my life, and I can only wonder what display will bring up the rear. Adult-child couples? Human-beast pairs?
That the academic Left essentially represents a childishly impulsive reaction against the grating incongruities of American life is strongly indicated by the kinds of non-American alternative it salutes. Islam invites at least as much hypocrisy as Christianity: scripturally mandated punishments are far more numerous and severe. Many Islamic nations are also market-driven in the overt materialist fashion garishly observable in Third World societies lunging into modernity on the coattails of oil. Women have fewer rights, and often suffer through more genuine brutality, in fundamentalist Islamic countries than anywhere else in the world. Yet an exotic “orientalism” has mesmerized the frustrated academic for the exclusive reason that it creates a mystery, an Otherness—that there is not here (n’importe où hors des États Unis). Religious practice seems so quaintly primitive to the young intellectual in these venues that it acquires an Edenic simplicity, like the nature-worship of Native Americans. The young grad student knows nothing of Dubai, but fancies that quotidian trade à l’arabe finds camels bringing loads of dates to the bazaar over endless dunes. As for women… how possibly to explain academic feminism’s indifference to the horrors of clitorectomy or of the Taliban’s decapitation of “rebellious” wives without having recourse to some secret admiration in our best-educated females for men who are not invertebrates?
So I must end up agreeing with Professor Sugrue that the hatred of all codes and rules in the academy (antinomia) is an infantile reaction to poorly identified stresses, full of resentment so anguishing that its victims often cannot tolerate the physical presence of their “abusers” or countenance a verbal exchange with them. One would expect very much the same response from a girl whose father has sexually assaulted her—and those of us who have wondered at these dramas for years can attest to the abundance of words like “rape” and “patriarchal” when tensions run especially high. Where I would disagree with Professor Sugrue and others of a truly minute academic Right (and this is no great disagreement, to be sure) is in their apparent tendency to consider the girl utterly ill bred and hallucinatory. The father may not be the monster he is accused of being… but the family remains far from functional. After all, a man’s children are in some measure a judgment upon him.
To our children, literature and the arts have become a refuge wherefrom they can spit vituperation at the mainstream because that mainstream is crass, dull, acquisitive, self-interested, and ruthless. Who can dial through the fare available nightly on cable TV and say that we have created a remunerative cultural stage for ingenious, spiritual people to play to appreciative audiences—and what creative genres, honestly, hold out the promise of a livelihood other than electronic ones? We have bestowed an official blessing upon this post-cultural pit of ordure because it is ever new, flashy, and profitable. Having done so, we should not feign outrage when that endangered plant, Taste—as twisted and sickly, perhaps, as an unlikely seedling triumphantly emerging from a pile of stones—buds and blossoms into gaudy flowers of protest.

The Good Intentions of Utopians Will Not Avert Fatal Consequences

Imagine a world without war—a world with only one government, a post-national world where one nation’s declaring war on another would no longer be possible.

Imagine a world with one currency and one economic system—a world where no region or sector would be left behind as certain others prospered, since all consumers on the planet would employ a single monetary standard and all monstrous profits would be scraped off and siphoned back to the needy.

Imagine a world with a single language and culture—a world where everyone could understand everyone else and where all would join in celebrating the same holidays and festivals rather than squabbling over superficial differences.

Many believe that this world would be heaven on earth. Racism would disappear incidentally, since racial prejudice is no more (according to this persuasion) than the vilifying of a different culture whose members have distinctive physical features. Remove the cultural difference, and you remove the racism.

Competitiveness would disappear, since the rewards of squelching a rival would be redistributed—to that rival and to others who have lost in the fray. Critics argue that innovation would also dry up; but proponents of this New Age view counter that “innovation” has poisoned our air and water, and that the single-world government will be quite well enough endowed to underwrite whatever special projects it deems worthy of development. Meanwhile, a lot of heart disease, emotional trauma, and violent crime would be reduced or expunged as everybody slowed down and became more civil.

Nuclear arsenals could be permanently destroyed, and we would never again have to worry about a “Dr. Strangelove” scenario where some maverick runs berserk or some clumsy flunkey brushes against a red button. Life would become such a low-pressure delight that our drug problem, even, would largely vanish.

Such, I most sincerely believe, is the most high-minded version, seen from best advantage, of the creed which moves the most idealistic of the Obama/Pellosi phalanx. There are two shortcomings in this vision, both of them fatal.

First is the category of items about which one may say, “Would that it were so… but human nature is not thus made.” War, for instance—in my reading of history—is never the first effect of violent impulses. People do not just rush to war with their pitchforks (or their AK-47’s) because the Japanese on the tour bus denounce Aunt Molly’s homemade spaghetti and somebody rings the village church bell. Usually, war is a long-delayed consequence of abused power. Ordinary citizens endure taxation, confiscation, and arbitrary imprisonment until death no longer frightens them more than life. Then they lie down in front of trains and tanks… and then they start throwing Molotov cocktails, and the rest. Not only will the motives for such a scenario NOT disappear if we centralize the world’s government and remove all weapons of mass-destruction: since centralization always multiplies the power wielded by a few, and since power never willingly diminishes itself, incitements to rebellion will proliferate in the Brave New World. That the common people need not be repressed with nukes will be good for the planet (or would be, if one could conceive of the planet as having a consciousness); it will be a matter of indifference to the common people, on whom a cop’s bullet in the chest will confer death just as terminally.

Then there is the category of items about which one must say, “But this isn’t what they promised us—it’s the very opposite! It’s a lie! They’re already jerking us around!” The Left has invested thirty years of air-time and incalculable volumes of ink creating the wedge of multiculturalism, specially designed to rive the coherence of Western societies. We are told that minority cultures have every bit as much right to survive as the mainstream. The global society which Leftist luminaries envision, however, will be drably mono-cultural—or, more accurately, post-cultural. Everyone will speak and think the same tepid soup of clichés. Amerenglish is already becoming an inarticulate paste of hip-hop claptrap, border Spanish, talk-show formula, and mutilated e-parlance (“lol”); while the Spanish, for that matter, employed by our immigrant population is completely inadequate for navigating a page of Unamuno or Ortega y Gasset (and probably for reading the editorial section of a Mexican newspaper). We are being deliberately lied to by those with the wits to do it (i.e., excuse Pellosi) on such issues, which has already drained the public’s faith in its democratic institutions to bone-dry. “Giving the underdog a break” has a potent appeal in America… but to awaken to the fact that one has been completely duped leaves one craving revenge and little inclined to extend a helping hand. Make no mistake: the ultimate objective of such lies is not “rich cultural diversity”—where do you see ANY sign of such riches? The hundred yards along the highway where Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and the Jade Palace crowd each other? No, the objective is to create an electorate of mutually unintelligible communities—different languages, different religions, different dress, different holidays—and then play them off against each other until one’s power base is permanently secure (that is, until elections become a mere sham).

Many of us rue the day that the atom was split. Most of us would agree that unbridled capitalism is a cultural slaughterhouse, ever replacing the familiar with the newfangled and devaluing tradition for thrill. A lot of us just don’t like hearing the roar of heavy traffic one block away every time we try to take a quiet stroll through our neighborhood. Barack Obama does not represent a remedy to this anguishing decline in the quality of our lives, however. His vision is panoramically utopian, and he and his elite of enlightened spirits occupy the Throne of Change at every stage of the transformation. This is the same old Caesarism that has made our species miserable throughout its history. Have we not auditioned enough Duces, Führers, and First Citizens in recent decades to know that a secular Moses will not find us a shortcut to the changes of personal lifestyle we need to make?

Albus an Ater Homo: Who Is This Caesar, and Who Are We Who Made Him?

The election of Barack Obama, who is half African (if you haven’t heard), to the late American republic’s presidency is supposed to have demonstrated to the satisfaction of educated, “enlightened” white Americans everywhere that our society is no longer “racist”. In fact, it demonstrated nothing of the kind. Rather, it sounded the charge for a whole new kind of racism—not bigotry, but true racism—while luxuriously, very expensively providing therapy for the soft bigotry of white liberals.

If race is so hellfire important in these matters, then let us reiterate the obvious, to begin with: Obama’s genetic material is only half African. He is NOT Jesse Jackson or Alan Keyes. His peculiar facial features indeed emphasize his multi-racial origin. This is neither here nor there, as far as I’m concerned. We are ALL multi-racial if we trace our line back far enough (just as every one of us possesses an ancestor who was enslaved at some point over the last ten thousand years). But for liberals, bearing the Atlas-like (or Christ-like) burden of The Sins of the World—not THEIR sins, but those of all those millions than whom they are better—Obama’s half-blackness is reassuring. They can look at him and see The Other while their subconscious mind whispers , “He’s so like us, really!” Of course, Obama also enjoys the varnish of an Ivy League education, making him more like the liberal intelligentsia than the stupid truck-driving rednecks so detested among that elite (and who continue to vote mostly Democrat to this day).

Nothing very new there. Liberals have sought to put their superior intellect, sensitivity, and moral acumen on display for decades now by launching costly “reparations” with other people’s blood and treasure and by advancing token representatives of The Victim in an insufferably condescending manner. What alarms me far more—and what I read as something new under the sun—is how much, and how openly, many black people have started hating white people since the election. Criticism of the president is “racist”, criticism of his policies is “racist”, criticism of his leaving our borders exposed is “racist”, criticism of his ceding our position of strength in the world is “racist”… any utterance which objects to impending chaos is “racist”. On every front, our government is embarking upon programs analogous to the sneak at the poker game who hits the light switch and kicks the table over, raking in all he can on hands and knees as the other players duke it out blindly overhead. Certain disaffected members of our society seem to have heard all those loose coins rolling around in the darkness. Anyone who wants to turn the lights back on is a “racist”.

To be fair, this situation has also been simmering away for some little while, though it was Obama’s long arm that finally doused the lights. I was told by students last fall that I mustn’t pronounce “gangster” as “gangsta”—that it gives angry young black males a free ticket (I almost wrote carte blanche) to molest me or kill me, since this is THEIR word, from whose uttering my skin color categorically precludes me. Similar rules seem to govern the use of the “n” word. Black “comics” like Dave Chapelle and Cat Williams can salt their monologues with it until not a single sentence remains untainted… and it’s funny. But only black people may laugh—and most certainly only black people may actually say the horrid syllables. Why? Williams appears to have explained (according to my confused teenager, who laughs with the innocence of a foolish child) that the word reminds whites of what they have done to blacks, hence making it an “empowering” word rather than a “put-down”. Merde de taureau—it does nothing of the sort. It marks Williams and those gullible numbskulls like him as electoral cannon fodder. Like the insistent defense of the Spanish language in our midst, it persuades vast numbers of adults who do little of their own thinking that they should act and vote en masse on the basis of some preposterously superficial characteristic such as they skin’s shade or their accent. A few paces farther along this road, and skin color or a “z” at the end of a name will be the first selection criterion of the major parties as they sift through candidates. By all means, let us have a black-speak, a Spanish-speak, a white-speak… isn’t that just what Dr. King was dreaming of?

If you grew up in Texas, as I did, then you know what it is to be typed by the Eastern Seaboard Elite as BOTH a stupid drawling racist redneck AND a stupid drawling stumble-footed cowboy. I read ten languages, most of which I taught myself… but in the academic job market, I have always been and will always be terminally southern and western, an irredeemable white male oppressor, insular, vulgar, and cerebrally damaged. I think I know a thing or two, therefore, about never being able to see the light of day under a heap of crude stereotypes shoveled steadily upon one.

Illustration: I remember a sequence in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, Baseball­—lauded to the heavens, of course, as the greatest thing of its kind ever filmed—where a northeastern “scholar”, nestled in a sumptuous armchair and framed by shelf upon shelf of thick volumes, sniffs over his sweater-vest that Ty Cobb was more of a liability than an asset to the game. All of this, naturally, came in reference to Cobb’s racial attitudes—in specific reference, indeed, to his leaping into the stands and beating a spectator who called him a “n-----“. Nothing was made of the fact that the Detroit fan, not Cobb, had used the slur word as a vilification, and very little was made of the fact that Cobb’s teammates subsequently went on strike to protest his suspension, since they, too, thought the taunt worthy of a thrashing. Even less was made of the clear fact that Cobb was a very troubled person, the son of a domineering father who was shot (accidentally or otherwise) by his mother in attempting to sneak through a window after a late-night foray. Naturally, Burns could not have been expected to unearth Cobb’s comment to Bill Rigney about Willie Mays: “He could have played with us.” All that mattered was that Cobb was a Georgia redneck. Bigoted northern boys are “complicated” or “tormented”: bigoted southern boys are stupid rednecks.

It is a challenge for me sometimes not to loathe “Yankees”… but then, I know the general shortcomings of my neighbors far better than Easterners do, and I should be distressed to have to choose my company only from among other Texans. The truth is that people, taken in any cross-section, are a pretty rum lot. We don’t need to “celebrate our diversity”—what an abysmally empty, inane phrase, and may God save the remnants of my sanity! We need to locate our common humanity, and cling to it. In common humanity—universal moral imperatives—is rooted tolerance of difference; harmony and community are not advanced by letting Difference scream itself hoarse in our face and then daring us to repeat a single word of an incomprehensible rave. To paraphrase Catullus on the subject of Caesar, I don’t know whether Obama’s black or white: I don’t care to court his favor.

Neo-Liberal Charity: God Replaced by the Progressive Fuhrer

It is childish to hate everyone named “Lewis” because the kid who beat you up in grade school bore that moniker. It is perfectly idiotic to picture all Russians as good ice-skaters and wrestlers who will break your arms on a whim because you have been filter-fed your entire knowledge of the world by television. How, then, shall we describe the contemporary liberal’s loathing of Christianity based on a very limited exposure to slavering televangelists and/or sensational newscasts about pedophile priests?

The truth (and one may call it a “sad truth” if one regrets the loss of independence) is that genuine charity requires metaphysics. If we do not believe in a transcending, eternal spiritual reality, then we can have no acceptable reason to treat those people kindly who can do us no conceivable material favor. Quid-pro-quo “sympathy” is quite another matter. Were you as Grand Governor or High Judge, say, to bestow a free education (i.e., paid for by taxpayers rather than yourself) upon illegally resident children because you wanted the future votes of their legally registered ethnic brethren, then your act would deserve to be called, not charity, but calculated self-interest. Some will say (or someone OUGHT to say, since it’s a worthy point) that no human act is devoid of self-interest. Even the hero who throws himself on a bomb that those around him may live has perhaps compensated for the guilty memory of a hit-and-run incident. Yes… but the “selfishness” of assuaging a troubled conscience and the cool “investment” involved in milking votes are of two houses. The self one serves in yielding to conscience is one’s identity in God—a being purged of weakness and wickedness which, seen from another angle, compels us to a radical self-renunciation. I do not dispute that a politico may feel conscience-bound to educate poor children in his district. Yet let us be very clear: he must make sincere personal sacrifice and beware that his material profit should not amply compensate him for any pain if his “noble act” is to deserve respect.

Such is not the case in the acts of those who rule us. Their “compassion” for the less fortunate is so clearly calculated that they themselves seldom bother to sanitize of cynicism their public references to manipulated voting blocks. The funding for their “charity” depends upon picking the pockets of those they broadly characterize as the “privileged” (read “undeserving rich”): they point fingers like the televangelists they so loathe rather than reaching into their own coffers. They cannot be bothered, furthermore, to foresee the obvious repercussions of their plundering upon innocent citizens: the hard-pressed property-owner whose taxes are hiked, the masses of legally registered school children deprived of resources, the “magnet effect” created by this largesse which draws more hundreds of thousands into communities not equipped to handle them… the traffic, the pollution, the crime… none of this seems to upset our governor’s or magistrate’s conscience once he has commanded the populace to do the “right thing”—and ingratiated himself to his constituency, in the process.

Yet even if this lord and master (to return to the main point) genuinely bleeds for the underprivileged, we must suppose him a very dangerous man unless he believes in a higher reality. Should he think that feeding, clothing, and housing everyone up to a certain level of uniformity (NOT objective necessity, but a fluctuant standard indexed to how the neighbors live) is his solemn obligation, then he will invariably become a lawgiver, a Moses who has the Plan and the Light; and since every aspect of his plan is this-worldly, his view will in fact embrace the perimeter of All That Is. He will come to consider himself Jehovah or Great Zeus, as well. Neo-liberalism invites such messianic lunacy (on both knees, as one might say). Because it “rationally” reduces all ends of existence to finite, comprehensible ends within an earthly existence, it sees the enlightened despot—a Lenin, a Stalin, a Castro, an Ugo Chavez—as the benefactor of humanity. This luminary can trample down the past’s illusions in which the foolish masses wallow so that he may deliver them to the only real happiness of which they are capable: a free allotment of beer, a free hi-def TV, free cable channels (with approved programming), a free pass for public transport, a free health card, and six free tickets a month to see gladiators at the Coliseum. But for his contempt of the past, he could be Hitler or Mussolini; but since nothing in the past can match his progressive vision, he is instead… well, in the germinating stage, he is very like what we have now in the U.S.

When President Obama exhorted the graduates of the University of Arizona last week to work for non-profits rather than remunerative businesses and to serve the underprivileged as teachers and nurses, he revealed on two counts that he has already strayed into intellectual folly and spiritual hubris by demanding a complete transformation of human nature. In the first place, not only is all human behavior ever so slightly tainted by self-interest: most people most of the time are largely ruled by selfish motives. This is disappointing, but it is also pretty much non-negotiable. The idealist who would alleviate the situation realistically takes up the Cross and preaches to those who will listen that attainment of the next world requires a triumph (or a series of small and provisional triumphs) over this world. The lunatic secular liberal, in contrast, has himself elected to high office and proposes laws against human greed and ambition. Only robots can be good citizens in such a regime.

In the second place, the Obama homily displayed the nonsensical kind of postponement which Deconstructionists, caught up in a post-metaphysical prison, have been mapping out for decades now. If young people are to become teachers and nurses to serve the less privileged, then the less privileged will either have their lot bettered—leaving no more need for teachers and nurses—or else show themselves stubbornly resistant to betterment, in which case teaching and nursing must be but a smacking of the head against the proverbial brick wall. The neo-liberal NEEDS vast numbers of people to be perpetually underprivileged so that he or she always has windmills at which to tilt. Fortunately for these new crusaders, the President’s trillion-dollar deficits ensure that the ranks of the destitute will swell for the foreseeable future.

This man is dangerous. He has shown unmistakable symptoms of a kind of megalomania which didn’t mushroom from the rot of George Bush’s stewing worldview until after a four-year term. He intends to save the world—and all of us who begrudge him free rein to do so will be regarded as the enemies of humanity.

The Border Ya Un' Otra Vez

It grows almost impossible to write sometimes. I seem to scrawl the same things… and nobody reads, or he who does refuses to understand. Words, after all, are for debate, and I am forced to believe that most people have made up their minds—have petulantly resigned their faculty of reason, more precisely, to indulge themselves in fantasy, come what may. No question of our time is more given to posturing Philippics and sanctimonious Jeremiads than our southern border’s enforcement… and no discussion so needful tires me more in prospect.

I was born and raised in Texas. I have spent most of my life here, despite several efforts to escape. I am pretty close to Ground Zero regarding the border crisis. I have listened to stuffed suits who inhabit walled-and-gated communities in Arlington or New Jersey call people like me racist for years now. I taught myself Spanish, and my copies of Azorin and Unamuno are penciled up and down the margins around favorite passages; I have fond memories of visiting my grandfather in El Paso, and of foraying into Juarez with him; after that distant childhood, in my scarcely less distant youth, I sought the courage for weeks (unsuccessfully) to ask out Janet Vargas, and later to speak to the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen waiting tables at El Toro’s in Austin…. All the typical m.o. of a racist, don’t you know? They always do what I’m doing now: “Why, some of my best friends are…”

The truth is that one can only NOT be a racist by embracing the strictly non-racist policies announced by our dogmatically non-racist rulers who, like George Bush, wax nostalgic over a refugee nanny or a cheerful “yard man”. Their experience is genuine, their sentiments pure: the testimony of my life, and of lives like mine, is a vomit of bile, hypocrisy, and suppression.

So why bother with words? I know what I see… but it is as unwelcome in the elite-monitored public forum as Cassandra’s prophecies of doom were during Troy’s orgies. I see that legal Hispanic Americans like the Rodriguez boy in San Bernadino are the most frequent victims of the kidnappings and murders which have washed over our unprotected border, and I see that the lives of these innocents don’t matter, since they stand in the way of “progress”. I see the legacy of persecution begun with the jailing of Agents Ramos and Campeon continued: the redoubtable Sheriff Arpaio himself is now a “racist”, hounded by the Obama “Justice” Department, despite his ethnic identity. I see that much of the execrable “stimulus package” was designed specifically to create construction jobs, and that the Democrat-controlled Congress, having stripped E-Verify from the original provisions, fully intends to invite about ten million illegal workers back into the country. I see these would-be populists salivating over the prospect of registering millions and millions of voters who speak only broken English and have no experience of demanding their legal rights in a free republic; I see them already so intoxicated on the mere odor of such power that the past winter’s rash of Senate- and Cabinet-level tax fraud, bribery, blackmail, and graft is a mere zephyr anticipating the hurricane.

On the Republican side, I see that FOX News never missed an occasion to deride the proposed closing of the border to protect American lives from swine flu. (Shepherd Smith’s homespun “logic” was fully analogous to the fool’s who resists patching a leaky hull because the ship has already taken in water.) I see this cable channel, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard all in bed with a neo-conservative economic globalism which will force the masses back to sweatshop servitude while the cosmopolitan elite fattens its Swiss and Caiman Island bank accounts.

Among the foolish masses increasingly fit only for the childish handling with which their overlords humiliate them, I see more and more immigrants who flaunt Spanish in my face—not Castellano, but a code-like dialect that even Cubans and Puerto Ricans can’t understand. I see the look in their eyes: “Move over… or clear out.” Among my neighbors of African descent, I see all too many who sense that Race is the wedge which will soon rive our society into shivers—and who intend to occupy the best position for snatching up stray coins. Money, money, money… I remember the Dixie League organizers two years back who spent more time pocketing change from the concession stand than teaching my son’s friends how to play baseball; and the words of black students and one friend whom I helped to write a dissertation breed perversely with Obamania: “How can you be rich and not be happy?” Among poor, uneducated whites, resentment of race-based politics waxes ever stronger—as it does in me, for that matter; but this group is all too willing to identify the removal of certain races with the removal of basic problems. Naturally, the ruling elite has long been eliciting this very response: if resistance to the oligarchic subversion of our republic can credibly be portrayed as racist, then suppressing it with ruthless severity will be rendered palatable. I can see all that, too. Can’t you?

I have but two further observations, both of which I have also made before. One is that, if ALL expenses of state and local government were to be raised ONLY by a sales tax on every purchase except staple food items, then most of us discontents would be much placated. We’re sick of providing free health care, education, transportation, and security for uninvited guests, and of underwriting new police hires and new prisons to handle thugs who ought to be deported. If law-abiding illegals were paying into the system the same as the rest of us, we could take the hostility at the grocery store in stride. There is no inalienable right to be liked by your neighbor—only to be protected from his predation of your wallet.

Second observation: if and when some segment of Mexico and/or Canada wants to form a union with certain central states interested in upholding constitutional law, that union will have my blessing. I can speak French as well as Spanish. I’m far more attached to living my life beyond the reach of the tyrant’s whimsy than I am to the Texas drawl or to Fourth of July cookouts. The Northeast Coast can go marry itself to the West Coast, for all I care, and apply its collective genius to developing new kinds of sodomy. The real future—the only future—for a culture both progressive and independent must lie in some variety of high-tech agrarianism which will allow ordinary people to mine their immediate neighborhoods for necessities and for leisure. A Mexican probably understands this much better than a Bostonian. How’s that for racism?